Hacking, Malware Represent the Greatest of Threats for Data Breaches during 2011

Verizon, which has published its Data Breach Investigation Report of 2012, points out that data breaches during 2011 took place with hacking and malware as the commonest of assault channels, published EWeek.com dated February 29, 2012.

On 28th of February 2012, Verizon produced an overall picture of the data published in its Data Breach Investigations Report of 2012, utilizing data it accumulated in connection with approximately 90 breach incidences from its total 855 for 2011.

Director of Research and Intelligence Wade Baker at Verizon Enterprise Solutions reports that the year is the foremost during when the company handled more incidences beyond USA compared to those within. According to him, as this proportion has been rising, the problem turns out to be a general case rather than a United States-specific. Dark Reading published this on February 28, 2012.

The new report shows that computer hacking at 86% along with malware incidences at 57% continue to be critical online crimes since these two modes of assaults had some role at least within 99% of the entire number of incidences. Also, these have turned out popular owing to their ease to attackers in gaining remote access, a convenient gateway, and automation. Technologies of social engineering are as well growing popular in connection with more than 50% of the data hacks probed, Verizon states.

Further, for most frequently utilized sites for data hacks during 2011, exploitation of easily cracked or default passwords occurred in 29% of the instances followed with backdoor programs (26%), stolen credential usage (24%), exploitation of command-and-control (C&C) vectors (23%), spyware and keyloggers (18%), and SQL-insertions (13%).

Nonetheless, Verizon cautioned of paying no heed to other threats while concentrating upon malware and hacking. This simply implies that organizations must recognize their shortcomings in connection with hacking or malware attacks, while rate the priorities of associated defenses.

Even now organizations spend sometime in detecting whether they've been hijacked or not. Whilst, attackers take an extremely brief time-span for executing their hack on a network followed with data theft, almost 60% of the cases came to light after months-years of their occurrences, Verizon discovered.